Seminar Series

Social connection is as necessary as food, water, shelter. Friend connections have positive impacts on health, happiness, and economic mobility. Friends can also buffer people against the high individual and societal costs of loneliness. But, in part because social psychology, relationship science, and evolutionary behavioral work have prioritized romantic and kin relationships, we know less about how friendship works among adults. My research aims to redress this gap by uncovering the design of friendship psychology. I begin from the premise that having friends—and enjoying the related benefits—requires people to solve multiple, likely recurrent challenges (e.g., finding, making, keeping friends). I also introduce the ‘embedded dyad framework’, which improves our ability to describe what these challenges look like: Just as better describing the shape of a lock allows us to generate better-informed predictions about the design of its key, better describing the shapes of friendship challenges allows us to generate better-informed predictions about how people solve them—or, really, the cognitive design of the tools that people use to solve them. In particular, this framework increases our descriptive power by providing a more ecologically-valid view of the social relationship landscape—one emphasizing that dyads, the typical focus of relationships work, exist embedded in wider, often densely interconnected networks. Therein, one’s dyadic partners—here, friends—frequently interact with other people, and these friend-other interactions can influence one’s friends, friendships, and outcomes. Thus, friendship challenges are likely to possess not only well-studied dyadic components (e.g., getting friends to like us), but also comparatively overlooked supra-dyadic ones (e.g., getting friends to like us more than they like their other friends). I discuss how this knowledge affects three key friendship challenges: finding, making, and maintaining friends, and I introduce implications for understanding the growth of friendlessness.